Severe Air Pollution and Labor Productivity: Evidence from Industrial Towns in China
| Autor: | Alberto Salvo, Jiaxiu He, Haoming Liu |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
Pollution
media_common.quotation_subject Air pollution medicine.disease_cause law.invention jel:J24 Toxicology law jel:O44 0502 economics and business medicine 050207 economics heterogeneous effects labor supply labor productivity acute exposure air pollution thermal inversions wind PM2.5 SO2 environmental damage environmental valuation air pollutants/adverse effects distributed lags instrumental variables Water pollution China Productivity 050205 econometrics media_common 05 social sciences jel:Q51 Prolonged exposure jel:Q53 Ventilation (architecture) jel:Q52 Environmental science jel:R11 General Economics Econometrics and Finance |
| Zdroj: | American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. 11:173-201 |
| ISSN: | 1945-7790 1945-7782 |
| DOI: | 10.1257/app.20170286 |
| Popis: | We examine day-to-day fluctuations in worker-level output at two manufacturing sites located in different industrial towns in China. Ambient air pollution in both towns, as proxied alternatively by fine-particle (PM2.5) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) levels, is severe but significantly variable, in part due to exogenous atmospheric ventilation. Across sites, pollution proxies and estimators, and correcting for worker heterogeneity and seasonality, we find a precisely estimated zero response on daily worker output from concurrent (same-shift) variation in air pollution. This is consistent with the stated perceptions of managers during our visits to over 10 firms in four provinces. We then follow the epidemiological literature and allow worker outcomes to respond to day-to-day variation in pollution with up to 30 days of delay. We uncover statistically significant adverse output effects from more prolonged pollution exposure, but these effects are not large. The cumulative effect – scaled for a large +10 μg/m3 PM2.5 variation in exposure on the day of output and on each of the previous 25 days – amounts to -0.5 to -3% of mean daily output. Estimates using SO2 are similar. Consistent with a simple model, more productive workers tend to respond more to pollution. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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